1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to design and manufacturing management systems, methods, and programs for performing management from designing to manufacturing of a product according to a production plan, particularly, relates to design and manufacturing management systems, methods, and programs for achieving mutual coordination of information between designing and manufacturing of a product.
2. Description of the Related Arts
Conventionally, when a manufacturer manufacturing electronic appliances, personal computers, peripheral devices, etc. is to sell a new product, demands for the product or the like is predicted thereby making a production plan of, for example, product specifications and the production volume. In accordance with the production plan, designing of the product is instructed to a design department. When the product drawing is completed through design work of the design department, the product drawing is delivered to a manufacturing department, wherein order of parts and manufacturing are performed, such that the product can be completed and prepared for the scheduled sale date. The product designing in the manufacturing department is a design operation using a CAD, and the drawings created through design operations are stored in a CAD drawing database. When designing is completed, in accordance with the CAD drawing, an E-BOM (Engineering-Bill Of Materials) is created by use of a drawing edit management tool, and stored in an E-BOM database. In accordance with the E-BOM in the E-BOM database, the manufacturing department received a design completion notice creates a M-BOM (Manufacturing-Bill Of Materials) by use of a manufacturing management tool, and stores it in a M-BOM database. The M-BOM sets, regarding a plurality of parts composing the product, detailed processing methods and procedures for actually producing products, and includes manufacturing instructions and order instructions of parts. Meanwhile, in the manufacturing department, the delivery date of the product shipment is advanced by sequentially ordering the parts of which designing has been determined during development of the new product. At this point, the persons in charge of orders take it into consideration that which order sequence of the parts makes the delivery date of the product shipment the shortest. Moreover, the persons perform ordering while constantly checking which part is finished with designing and whether the finished schedule is determined. In such management in the manufacturing department, improvement of the economical efficiency and shortening of the lead time in the product manufacturing have been large objectives, and various attempts have long been made regarding the preparation of the parts.
However, in such conventional design and manufacturing management, design information such as design plans, CAD drawings, and E-BOMs in the design department and manufacturing information such as production plans and M-BOMs in the manufacturing department have been managed in separated databases; therefore, the persons in charge in the manufacturing department have to consider the order sequence of parts for each of the parts while checking the progress of the operations in the design department, and have to always consider the progress state of the design department, thereby causing great workload, which is problematic. Meanwhile, in the design department, sometimes design change is required after the design is determined. However, since the manufacturing information of the design-determined parts is managed in the separated database of the manufacturing department, there is no means for minutely notifying the persons in charge of designing whether the parts have already been ordered, thereby causing a problem that it takes labor and time for understanding the state of the manufacturing department when design is to be changed.